In the processing and preparation of parts of poultry and animals such as poultry thighs for sale and consumption in the retail market, such as in restaurants and grocery stores, it is highly desirable to package and deliver the meat to the restaurants and grocery stores with the bones removed. Deboned meat can be easily cut-up and used in sandwiches or other food products where it is desirable to have the bones previously removed prior to cooking and serving.
An additional advantage of removing the bones from the meat during processing and before cooking is that the bones do not have to be cooked with the meat, thereby conserving heat energy. Further, the removal of the bone from the poultry part prior to cooking the meat allows the bone to be saved and used for bone meal or related products.
In the past, automated processes have been developed for the removal of meat from the bone of a poultry part, such as from the bone of a poultry thigh, by engaging the bone with a scraping tool and scraping along the length of the bone. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,672,000, 4,327,463, 4,495,675, and 4,736,492 disclose deboning apparatus having two or more notched scraping blades which engage the bone. The notches of the blades are moved from opposite sides of the bone and closed about the bone with the notches of the blades straddling the bone, and the bone is moved longitudinally through the blades. As the bone is moved through the notched blades, the blades progressively scrape the meat from the bone.
However, the raw meat has a tendency to cling tightly to the bone. Consequently, it usually is necessary for the scraper blades to engage the thigh bones in frictional contact to ensure the meat is completely scraped from the bone. A problem that arises with such prior art deboners is that the blades engaging the bone sometimes inadvertently gouge or chip and sometimes crack the bones as they scrape the meat from the bones. This might tend to create bone fragments that can become lodged in the stripped meat, which poses a health risk to the ultimate consumer who expects that when he or she purchases a "boneless" product, it is indeed completely boneless.
In order to avoid the creation of bone fragments during the deboning process, apertured elastic meat stripper disks have been substituted for the scraper blades. The bone is pushed longitudinally through the aperture of the disk and the resilient disk retards the movement of the meat, thereby separating the meat from the bone. U.S. Pat. No. 4,811,456 teaches the use of such elastic disks.
Additionally, U.S. Pat. No. 5,173,076 discloses an automated deboning apparatus which includes a series of elastic stripping disks, each of which is mounted adjacent and moves with a conveyor tray on which a poultry thigh is received and moved about a processing path. As the thigh is moved along the processing path, the thigh bone is urged through openings in the stripper disks, whereupon the meat of the thigh is progressively stripped from its bone. Such a system is, however, limited in size and in the number of deboning modules included therewith, which limits the production capacity of the apparatus. Conventional deboning apparatus also generally are not readily expandable to increase the number of parts that can be processed as needed.
Accordingly, it can be seen that it would be highly desirable to provide an improved method and apparatus for completely separating the meat from the bones of poultry parts or similar animal parts and reducing the risk of creating bone chips or fragments of bone that can become lodged in the meat of the parts, and with the apparatus being expandable to enable a greater quantity of poultry parts to be processed.